EATING meat is a major contributor to two of the greatest problems humanity faces: global warming and the loss of biodiversity. Farming is one of the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions, while the amount of land turned over to grow food for livestock leaves less space for wildlife.
This is why many studies have highlighted the massive environmental benefits there would be if only people ate less meat. A plant-based diet has a much lower footprint in terms of carbon emissions and land. What’s more, there are also ethical and health arguments for such a diet.
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Yet global meat consumption continues to rise. It isn’t just that there are more people on the planet, we are also eating nearly twice as much meat per person as in the 1960s.
That means methods of producing this food more efficiently offer a path to minimise its environmental impacts. One way to do this is genetic modification. While plants altered in this way are now widely grown and consumed, the same isn’t true for farm animals.
But this looks set to change. A company has created hundreds of pigs gene edited to be resistant to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, or PRRS (see “First gene-edited meat will come from disease-proof CRISPR pigs”). These animals won’t just boost farmers’ profits. By reducing the loss of animals caused by PRRS, they will also shrink the carbon and land footprint per kilo of pork.
Researchers are also modifying livestock in other ways, such as to be more heat tolerant and to belch out less methane. But will people embrace the idea of eating gene-edited meat? There is no rational reason not to, given that the genetic changes made with techniques such as CRISPR can be more minor than the dozens of natural mutations in DNA that occur in every single animal. But food choices are seldom just about rationality.
However, in places such as the US, meat from CRISPR animals won’t usually need to be labelled. In other words, the gene-editing revolution may not be advertised. That might not be a bad thing
